Letters to Congress, one

I’ve just drafted a letter that I will be printing out and mailing to my Representative tomorrow. I will be doing a lot more of this, and when I do, I will share the texts here. I have plans already to write similar letters to my two Senators.

Dear Representative Langworthy,

I am a constituent of yours from Orchard Park, NY. I have lived here since 2003, and in Western New York since my family moved here in 1981. I am writing to you today to express my deep dismay at the levels of power and access to our Federal Government’s financial infrastructure that the current Administration has apparently given to Elon Musk.

Mr. Musk has been very active since the President took office, and just over the last few days he and several underlings were apparently given full access to the nation’s payment systems by the Secretary of the Treasury. Mr. Musk has apparently taken it upon himself to demolish an entire government agency, USAID, which was created by an act of Congress and which presumably can only be legally ended by an act of Congress. He has also assumed control of the mechanisms for the Federal Government’s financial expenditures, which is a power that our Constitution gives to the Congress alone.

It is difficult to know what part of all this is the most alarming. Not only do Mr. Musk’s actions, which are assumed to be endorsed by the President, constitute a usurpation of power by the Executive Branch, but it also does so in deliberate and flagrant violation not just of existing laws but also our Constitution, which I have been led to believe you hold dear. Mr. Musk has been subject thus far to absolutely no Congressional oversight for his actions or of those under him, and for that matter, Mr. Musk now occupies a position of invented authority that was invented out of whole cloth, with no advice or consent by the Senate through the standard confirmation process.

Our nation’s government was constructed with many mechanisms designed to prevent the unwise concentration of power in one branch over another. My fear is that you, and others in the Congressional majority, are actively ignoring those mechanisms and choosing not to employ them in any way, in what is a de facto endorsement of the concentration of power in the Executive Branch, at either the President’s behest or at that of servants like Mr. Musk.

It is my hope, as a constituent of yours, that you will recognize the unacceptable degree of power-seizure that the President and Elon Musk have been carrying out, and that you, along with your colleagues in the United States Congress, will exercise your powers as lined out in the pages of the United States Constitution, to prevent these gross excesses. I do not wish to live in a time when concepts like “checks and balances” and “separation of powers” are judged to be quaint anachronisms, discarded in the dustbin of history in favor of what is clearly an advance of authoritarianism and a seizure of power by the current Executive Branch.

Thank you for your attention.

I’ve no idea what kind of response this will get. We’ll see. I feel I have to do something, and this is a start.